Bad manners, blockchains, open data, government as a platform and and Birmingham pigs in muck.

Anything Tom Steinberg writes on Open data needs to be taken seriously. It was he who was one of the key people behind the power of information task force report which got government starting to understand why it’s important to free up information. Never a natural insider, now he writes:

So, how do I feel about it all now, eight and a half years on from the Open Data Principles? Not good. I’ve watched the government of the country I live in sell off our national addressing database, a breathtakingly moronic move that more than undoes the sum and total of good works done in the same time period. And I’ve watched that same government tacitly endorse attempts to kneecap our Freedom of Information law, whilst simultaneously grinning and waving a flag labeled ‘most transparent government in the world.’

I’ve not seen any meaningful attempt to systematically overhaul procurement rules to ensure that new government computer systems produce decent open data by default. This omission is especially important since building open data feeds into new government computer systems remains the only way that most government data will ever get released cheaply, quickly, and in appropriate formats. Factories and power stations only pump out less rubbish when the law says they must, and the same is true of government computer systems. International progress on that front so far? Somewhere between dismal and undetectable.

and

Transparency laws are like babies: There’s no way to get a real one without someone somewhere having to go through a very unpleasant experience that they’d really do almost anything to avoid. And as a consequence, meaningful transparency laws don’t get implemented except in situations where legislators fear something even worse than the effects of more transparency.

I agree. I’ve sat on the Local Public Data Panel at the Department of Communities and Local Government. Rarely did I feel I was being much use, often felt stifled by process and internal political demands. This stifling of what people on the panel wanted to achieve was usually tolerated because we were over respecting convention and frankly being polite (or weary).

Government can and does co-opt, in part to control change and bog things down. I do though only partly agree that being combative is the whole answer. Government also needs to invest in sharing information. We’ve benefited from that investment. It needs to be a combination of a will to change from within government and impatience for change outside. But then I’m probably still being polite.

Bitcoin for Volunteers and blockchain for government.

Bitcoin is the digital currency that is being fussed over at the moment as Australian Craig Wright says he invented it. It’s important because it is a way of creating currency that doesn’t require a bank. It allows us to trust each other with who owns which money – because we can all share the same cash book – or ledger.

Blockchain is, rightly, also on the minds of government. Why? If this technology helps us trust each other with money, it can also help us trust each other with much more besides: who has voted, who owns which house, who is entitled to which services and who is qualified to deliver them.

That’s why we started building what we call ‘government as a platform’. That little catchphrase sums up a huge amount of work building many different things – not just actual technical platforms, but also standards, design and service patterns, data registers, and the skills and capability of the people who deliver digital services, and indeed the whole business of government.

All those things – the platforms, the standards, the legacy technology, the service design – come together as an ecosystem of interconnected components that departmental teams can use to assemble their services.

They will only do that, though, if they actually trust those components in the first place. So delivering transformation is just as much about fostering a new culture of trust across government.

The old culture depended on departmental silos, and services designed and delivered within them. Instead we’ve got to work across those silos. And that depends on trust.

Rather than a single central authority demanding trust and declaring: “I say this data is correct,” you have the distributed consensus of everyone in the chain, saying in unison: “we agree that this data is correct.”

They bring with them built-in integrity and immutability. You can only write new data, nothing is ever removed or deleted.

It does sometimes get touted as a wonder solution. In time institutions that we rely on to manage trusted processes – planning departments, banks, local authorities – will be changed by technology like this. The most important first start for government though is to recognise that many of it’s structures are a barrier to better ways of working, to focus instead on what needs to be done to solve a problem.

That is what Mark Rogers – Chief executive at Birmingham City council – has been thinking about in what he calls a

Hosted by that hotbed of forward thinking grooviness, the ImpactHub, a small number of fellow travellers sat down for a couple of hours to make my brain hurt on the subject of an ‘open innovation system’.

Pretentious? Hopefully not.

Under discussion was actually something very straight-forward; how we might further encourage and accelerate a progressive, welcoming and applied approach to convening interested parties from civil and civic society to tackle the city’s wicked – and not-so-wicked – issues.

Those of you who have been following my ramblings for the last couple of years will know that I am (very) interested in working out, among a number of things, how the council can itself become more innovative, whilst also being more enabling of others across the city to do the same.

It’s important that people like Mark take the time to have their head hurt. It’s much more productive than the sort of polite government meetings that stifle change in areas such as open data.

3 comments

So sorry for handing on the post on the local govt open data panel. I agree strongly with tom’s argument, there isn’t enough table banging. however when i moved to the ‘crime and justice sector transparency panel’ (what do you mean you haven’t heard of it) i tried a more forthright approach and it got me somewhere, but not very far, the civil service is good at managing dyspeptic campaigners.

Will you were right to hand it on – indeed sometimes it’s important to share the load. I got some stuff out of it, not least a better insight into what you had been dealing
with for years. But it wasn’t all bad by any means, just the will for change where the power sat was weak. Oh and thanks for reading.

Nice post Nick. I was a bit excited to hear that the voluntary sector somewhere might be experimenting with blockchain, so went off noodling around for more info on HullCoin. I was a bit disappointed that it seems to have started off as essentially payment for ‘volunteering’, which raised all sorts of questions. Or perhaps that’s simply the way the Guardian journalist thought they had to describe it, so that readers would understand (http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/22/hullcoin-bitcoin-volunteers-new-way-pay). Only at the end of the article do they suggest a much bigger picture: “HullCoin, they say, could one day become the ‘blood supply’ of a growing collaborative economy, which extends from locally grown food projects to collective purchasing and savings networks, providing an economic safety net for hard times and new opportunities for good.”

I know personal stories are important, and people connect with them and so on, but I think in cases like this we all need to take the time to have our head hurt, as the story about mopping a floor in exchange for a cup of tea really doesn’t do any credit to the thinking which is obviously going on behind HullCoin. (I note that the HullCoin website doesn’t use the term ‘volunteering’.)

Much as you are frustrated by the polite government meetings which stifle change, I’m left feeling frustrated by the limited and limiting ways we have to talk about and understand participation, contribution and collaborative economies. I think this stifles change too, by hiding from people what is possible.